Listen. Think. Act.: Lessons and Perspectives in Community Development

By Agnes Igoye, Thomas Karrel and Jamie Van Leeuwen

This is a book about community development and how to do it better! It is a book for anyone interested in doing good community development work.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Global Livingston Institute
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737697718

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ENDORSEMENTS

In this book, enthusiastic global development fighters come together to extract innovative and authentic multicultural lessons from their common, personal learning and transformative experiences to develop communities through empowerment and respect. These lessons are applicable worldwide, by those who want to reduce human suffering using an equity approach.

- Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, Vice Chancellor of University of Global Health Equity, Butare, Rwanda

With candid stories about their personal experiences and exercises for the reader at the end of each chapter, Igoye, Karrel, and Van Leeuwen illuminate the values of the Global Livingston Institute's Listen. Think. Act. framework. Beyond its profound relevance to community development, ‘Listen. Think. Act.: Lessons and Perspectives in Community Development’ provides vital insights for leaders in any field.

- Dr. Angela Thieman Dino, Senior Instructor, University of Colorado, Boulder

For anyone considering or already engaged in community development work, Agnes, Thomas, and Jamie share practical and personal experiences that will challenge and inspire you to think deeply about how to best involve and engage communities on the journey to creating lasting change.

- Denis Kibirige, Legislative Draftsman of the East African Community

LISTEN. THINK. ACT.

Lessons and Perspectives in Community Development

Agnes Igoye, Thomas Karrel, and Jamie Van Leeuwen

Listen. Think. Act.

GLI Global Livingston Institute. Listen. Think. Act.

©2021

Denver, Colorado

Lake Bunyonyi, Kabale, Uganda

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-7376-9771-8

Book layout by Jena Skinner

100% of book sales will go to support the community development work of GLI and the Dream Revival Center in Uganda.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWARD

AUTHORS’ NOTE

PROLOGUE

Connect with Our Community

PART I: LISTEN

CHAPTER ONE

Reinvent the Narrative: Sharing Stories and Finding Common Ground

CHAPTER TWO

Build Empathy: Seeking to Understand Different Perspectives

PART II: THINK

CHAPTER THREE

Exchange Ideas: Having Important Conversations About Societal Issues

CHAPTER FOUR

Forge Strong Relationships: Partnering With Clear Intention

PART III: ACT

CHAPTER FIVE

Innovate Through Experimentation: Learning Through Failure and Change

CHAPTER SIX

Create Lasting Impact: Transforming Communities Through Local

Ownership and Sustainable Ideas

EPILOGUE

Tugende

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

REFERENCES

FOREWARD

This is not your typical textbook. I write this foreword as someone who felt deeply moved while participating in this project as editor of this book. I am not an expert on Uganda, and I have only been to East Africa twice in my life—once to visit a friend shortly after college, and then many years later with the Global Livingston Institute as part of a book project I was working on that was in part about a family from the Democratic Republic of Congo who found refuge in a settlement in Uganda after fleeing conflict. However, my brief encounters with the people that I met during that journey have stayed with me. I remember standing with staff from GLI in long lines at the border crossings, the arduous and bumpy road trip we made together across remote areas as we traveled to the refugee settlement in western Uganda that was sheltering so many people in need of a safe home, and the glimpses I got of life in the big cities in sub-Saharan Africa. I distinctly remember the people we met and the astonishing stories that they shared about the communities where they were living. I have always cared deeply about trying to get to know other people better by listening to the stories they have to tell.

This book brings all of this to life. The authors take you into various communities in East Africa and the United States and provide key perspectives on how we should approach local and international community development work. It is a textbook that will better inform a student seeking to travel to a new country and connect with a non-government organization to try to make the world a better place. But it is also a book for people who are simply interested in building stronger communities at home or abroad, and for people who travel to other places around the planet and wonder what they should do when someone on the street approaches them and asks them to pay their school fees. It is a book that truly inspires anyone who wants to better understand community development and what it means to Listen. Think. Act.

As a storyteller myself, I appreciate the way that this book uses the art of storytelling to teach the reader how to engage in an iterative process of continual improvement while attempting community development. The stories you will find in this book are real and the encounters are genuine. In reading what the authors have to share, you come to learn why it is important sometimes to just stand there as opposed to just do something, as overly hasty action can have unintended consequences. I also believe this book is just getting started and there will be many future iterations to write as we continue to learn and work together as global citizens.

There are many more stories to be told that will continue to guide our various societies on the best way to approach community development work, whether that be in Kalamazoo or Kampala. And there is a lot of community work still to be done. As community development workers, educators, conservationists, and public health leaders, the opportunity to impact change exists all around the globe. While this work requires a sense of urgency, how we all engage in community development work is paramount. The opportunity to do a lot of good exists, but this text reminds us how important it is to pay attention to our approach, and that we can sometimes even make things worse when we think we are making them better!

All that to say, please keep reading. There is a lot to unpack in the pages ahead. I hope that you enjoy the journey this book offers as much as I have enjoyed the journey I have taken with the Global Livingston Institute. By listening and thinking a great deal before we act in concert with others, there is a lot that can be learned along the way.

Helen Thorpe

Journalist and Author

Denver, Colorado

AUTHORS’ NOTE

This book is written as we: a cross-cultural group of three people, united by friendship and a set of shared beliefs and values regarding how to do truly good community development work.

Agnes Igoye is a Ugandan who has devoted her life to issues surrounding human trafficking, migration, and other human rights, and used her voice and powerful personal journey to inspire thousands of people around the globe, ranging from young scholars to national leaders. Thomas Karrel is an American who believes in the transformative powers of cross-cultural exchange and travel as tools for building a better society for all. He specializes in designing interactive and immersive curricula and programs to allow for community conversations to flourish. Jamie Van Leeuwen is an American who has devoted decades of his life to growing community development organizations throughout the United States and the world, sparking partnerships, collaboration, and growth across sectors, and connecting people around the globe.

Throughout the book, we will at times deviate from our collective we voice, to allow each author to share personal accounts of lessons that strengthen and bring to life the book’s larger themes. We hope you enjoy our collective story as much as WE have enjoyed writing it.

Listen. Think. Act.

PROLOGUE

Connect with Our Community

Who is this book for? The short answer is that we wrote this book for anyone interested in doing good community development work, the tenets and definition of which merit their own discussion that you will find throughout this text.

Who created this book? We are a trio of people from diverse backgrounds who have devoted much of our adult lives to community development work, and who met and began collaborating after participating in efforts to improve our own home communities, both in the United States and in East Africa. We then began to work together to create more authentic partnerships with like-minded people living in those two regions, attempting to reach across the physical divide of the Atlantic Ocean and the cultural divide of colonialism and its aftermath. We will share more about ourselves and our cross-cultural work as we go along.

To get us started, for the purposes of this book, good community development is something that maximizes the collective well-being of a target population and limits suffering from preventable problems. It increases the quality of life of communities with an eye towards equity. What we find compelling is that community leaders, nonprofit professionals, artists, businesspeople, politicians, entrepreneurs, researchers, and educators all engage in community development work every day, without necessarily realizing it. Some do it better than others. It is an art, a trade, a skill, a science. It requires practice and experience to do it well. We wrote this book because, more than ever, the world needs leaders around the globe who can master good community development.

In preparation for writing this book, we reflected on our time as students with a passion for community development, reading textbooks from a wide variety of subjects and disciplines. In turn, we spent time reflecting on our years in the field, and how little our studies and these books truly prepared us for the real work at hand. It is probably not surprising that there are few, if any, textbooks about which we have fond memories, or that we really need to go and read again. Some of them we probably never read all the way through, if we opened them at all. Some of our best textbook memories involved the opportunity to return them to the university bookstore to recover a pittance (relative to what we had paid for them) to spend on a proper celebration marking the end of another semester! It is unlikely you will ever hear anyone say over a hot date or a stimulating dinner party, I have this really great textbook you should read! With this book, we are hoping to change that.

Over the course of this book, you will read about our personal experiences doing community development work and about our collaborative efforts through the Global Livingston Institute (GLI), the organization that brought the three of us together. In the spirit of the work we have done through this organization, we have taken a unique approach to writing this book. Our goal was to produce a textbook that would tell a story with a unique voice and engage our readers to reflect on their own values and communities, to help bring these topics to life. Based on our experiences as practitioners, researchers, educators, and humans, we believe that if we tell the story of community development and demonstrate how to truly engage people differently, then we might be able to write a textbook that becomes something more than a chore for students to get through; a textbook that makes the reader actually look forward to what the next chapter has to say; a textbook that might be a topic of discussion and promote dialogue over a family dinner or long road trip. We wanted to produce a textbook that prompts you to start listening and thinking more about the actual practice of good community development, even if you might not agree with everything we say. And when you finish reading this book, we hope that you will ultimately determine how you define good community development. Is it the same as the way we define it, or do you see another angle?

This will also not be the most technical book on the planet. If you are interested in anthropology, public health, sociology, economics, policy, public administration, diplomacy, political science, or any of the other fields relevant to doing good community development work, there are plenty of more substantive books out there. This book is our best effort to share real-life stories and applied collective knowledge about the nuanced world of community development that we have seen over decades across the United States, Uganda, and the rest of the world.

Our audience and topic are broad, but we hope to provide clarity in how our world should approach community development work. We hope that with each turn of the page, you think about how you can listen, think, and act to effect positive change in your own community, or wherever your community development work takes you. For the purposes of this textbook, we explore how you get started and what community development looks like from the ground up. We look at how the principles of this work can translate from Denver, Colorado, to Kampala, Uganda, or the other way around. Framed by our own core values at the GLI of Listen. Think. Act., we start with the foundations of good community development, through story-sharing and empathy-building, and then move to exchanging ideas, building relationships, and fostering collaborations. We look at forming strategic partnerships and investing in alliances that are built to last. We showcase both the advantages of approaching your work this way and the inherent challenges of being bold enough to collaborate.

We then bring it all together and look at the secret sauce of community development. Spoiler alert: There is no secret sauce! Good community development work takes time, and we have to roll up our sleeves and dig in. It takes substantial effort, patience, and determination, and sometimes it requires not a second chance or a third chance but a fourth and fifth chance until we get it right. Ultimately, good community development workers should build a solid résumé of failures—otherwise known as learning opportunities—and thus become ever better equipped to more closely approximate success. We constantly remind the reader that once we have started acting, we need to listen and think again to determine if the actions we have put forward are actually working. Community development needs to be measured and evaluated constantly; it is time consuming, frustrating, complicated and at times just plain exhausting. But when done well, community development initiatives truly transform communities and change lives. Worth it!

Throughout the book we are going to feature a series of transformative moments in our own professional journeys. These are experiences that have fundamentally changed the way we think about the world and the way we do our work. Even if we may not have realized it at the time, when we look back, we realize that one conversation we had or one encounter we experienced truly altered how we do our work, and in many cases shaped those shared values and beliefs that we bring to community development.

While we hope to make this more engaging than your average textbook, it is still a textbook. You will have homework. At the end of each chapter, you will assume the role of a community development leader (if you haven’t already in real life) and design your own intervention to address a real problem in your community. We call this the Community Changemaker Challenge! This exercise was inspired by Stanford University’s D School’s methodology (Raz, 2018) and informed by curricula from other pioneering organizations such as IDEO (IDEO, 2021), and Tulane University’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking (Taylor Center, 2021). Design thinking is a solutions-based approach to solving real-world problems. When you hear the word design, you might think this method is more relevant to architects or engineers than to community development professionals, but this approach can be used by almost anyone who wants to rigorously think about, and address, a given problem or challenge. As a practitioner of community development, you too are an architect of change.

You can also expect to encounter thought-provoking questions, or conversation starters, and additional recommended content after each chapter. This content should inform your own group discussions among colleagues and other community development practitioners. It should also lead to other questions that we haven’t asked! For this textbook to be worth your time and investment, you should take it out for a test drive. Ask your friends and family what they think. Reflect on our questions and come up with some of your own. Reflect on the case studies and go back and re-read sections that interest you. These are real people in real situations doing real community development work. Think about the roles they play and what roles you hope to assume in your own work. You might find some incidental career coaching or meet some people whose ideas can be pivotal to your own professional and academic development.

At times, you might also find yourself in disagreement with the position that we take or a community perspective we present. If you are looking for the silver bullet or the quick win in community development, you should put this text on the shelf or return it to the bookstore and move on to the next one. We do not have it. If it is out there, we would love to read about it.

If you, like us, are ready to embrace complexity and approach this topic with both humility and a spirit of innovation, discovery, and determination, we hope this book will prove useful to you. There are other stories and there are other perspectives out there, and like any good scholar you should assemble all of those into your toolbox to make your own assessment about best practices in community development. The stories you find here are mostly told from the perspectives of people who live and work in the United States and Uganda, people who have seen and experienced many different approaches to this work through nongovernmental, governmental, and private organizations, and continue to succeed and fail in their efforts to improve communities around the globe. There are stories from people who know what good community development looks like and who are actively engaging in the science themselves. These are stories we hope you will recommend or recount to someone you meet who wants to create meaningful change and positive impact in their own respective community but is not sure how. The issues may be different, but we have a feeling that the approaches and the values will be the same.

We also want this book to be a starter for young people to inspire them to change the world by engaging in the best possible community development work regardless of their chosen profession. Whether one is a banker, a surgeon, a lawyer, a teacher, or a social worker, there are ways that all these roles can contribute to good community development. We want our readers to think bigger and think differently about how to take on our world’s most complex social issues and we want you to understand that each of these issues is, in fact, solvable.

However, this success only happens when we Listen and Think before we Act. With that, turn the page and begin the journey with us.